To prevent undesirable visual intrusion into the interior of a room, house or vehicle, glass windows are known which have variable tinting and variable transparency. For example, such windows may be switched between a light-transmissive state and a milky, diffusely scattering state. Glasses used for this purpose are also known as “LC glasses” (LC: liquid crystal) since the variable transparency is achieved by the use on the window pane of liquid crystals which are electrically activated. To this end, the liquid crystals are arranged between electrode layers and electrically oriented as required. The electrode layers required for this purpose, which have to be simultaneously transparent and sufficiently conductive even in large-area applications, result in high costs, however.
It could therefore be helpful to provide an optical element with variable transparency as well as an organic light-emitting device with such an optical element.